Reality Internet
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
AOL is partering with a Reality TV “big name” to make a program called Gold Rush (link).
I really don’t like reality TV. I never have. But basically they’re talking about making an interactive puzzle-game online, not unlike this damn notpron puzzle I’ve been doing, but with a $1.6 million prize.
This is going to be one interesting story to follow. Also, Yahoo is making a competing “show” with Stephen Spielberg. These guys are probably on to something.
Power’s out
The power went out again at Oxy last night. I remember last year when we lost power in some gargantuan flooding rains, we stopped school for three days while repairs were made.
This time the power was only out for a few hours, basically from 11:30 to 4 am. As far as I know, one of the cables that pumps power in to oxy split and fell to the ground, and did some odd electrical things that basically made us shut down power for the LA power & water folks to fix everything up.
What do you do when the power goes out late at night? Most people assumed that today would have no classes (incorrectly) and stayed up to party. I took pictures because I’m a loser.
Nobody understands global warming
Except, apparently, Dr. Hansen.
The fun thing about quibbling over global warming is that the argument is essentially “trends” vs “data points.” People who claim that we need to act to reduce emissions and do other environmental things want to tell us that each year is a little bit worse than the last, and it’s going to keep going that way.
Peopel who claim that there’s nothing to worry about want to say that, sure, while it may be a little warmer this year, it’s just one year. What does that matter in the grand scheme of things?
And the really good part is that if you actually look at climate study data, you’ll find at least five million different trends all over the planet. Some places are getting warmer, some colder, and sure, you can take an average, but what does that really mean?
So nobdoy knows what’s going on. All we’ve got are best guesses.
But I think it’s funny that we have an entire NYT article covering the fact that Dr. Hansen from NASA is being “softly censored” about global warming, but the article doesn’t even try to say what Hansen isn’t allowed to say.
That’s good censorship.
I don’t understand batteries
Like so many rechargable batteries that I’ve bought over the years, the one in my laptop is slowly dying.
My phone battery is already almost pointless, and I’m sure that my iPod won’t be too far behind the pack. I suspect this is because I don’t know how to use batteries anymore.
I remember being told, ages ago, that one should always run a battery down as much as possible, then recharge it entirely at once. But batteries are like buter and margarine - what’s better changes every year, and I gave up trying to figure it out long ago.
So I guess i’m going to have to buy another laptop battery.
Laugh it up, fuzzball
I realize again the irony of linking to someone who gets more comments than I have readers, but here is Scott Adams’ take on the Hamas victory.
How To: Rounded Edges in Photoshop
I finally, FINALLY figured out how to round the edges of an image using Photoshop (well, ok, imageready). Ironically, I figured this out just as I stopped using an actual “banner” image with actual “edges” on my own site.
But for the record, here’s the simples solution that skips the whole “moving the image to MS Paint and using horrible compression to make your image looks more grainy” bit.
When you have your image cropped to the size you like it in Photoshop (CS or CS2, I’m not sure about the older ones), go to File -> Edit in Imageready.
Imageready will then come up with the file you were working on. Now, in your little toolbox, select the “Rounded Rectangle Marquee Tool” (i.e. exactly the shape we’ve always wanted but that photoshop is retarted not for having), and frame your banner so that it’s edges are rounded the way you’d like.
Then go to the Select Menu -> Inverse
Hit delete.
Voila! A banner with rounded edges. Just go File -> Edit it Photoshop to send everything back to your orignial program, and you’re done. Remarkably simple, but annoying that you have to use a second program.
But at least you can keep your images high-quality this way.
Being funny TWICE
Of all the possible professions in the world, the ones that impress me most are, in this order:
- Daily Comic Artist
- Author
- Phlebologist
Phlebologists are impressive because not only are they willing to spend their medical careers sucking blood from people’s veins, but they must also listen to really bad jokes about what they’re called. I once made the mistake of making a joke before they drew blood, and I will never make the same mistake again.
It might be more accurate to say that the idea of being an Arist scares me more than it impresses me. This is because I enjoy writing despite the fact that I’m not that good at it. And also, being an author (so far as I understand it) is largely made up of microwave pizza and deadlines, two things which scare me very much.
Finally, Daily Comic Arists, and I mean the kind that both write and draw their comics themselves, are the people who I am most impressed with. I try very hard to be funny at least once every day, which is much harder to do in writing than you’d think.
Anyone who can manage to be funny once a day, every day, 365 days a year (or an equivalent amount of funny, say they were funny four times in one day and took a trip to hawaii for the next three as a reward) has my respect and admiration. And if, like Scott Adams, they manage to be funny TWICE every day (once for the blog and once for the comic), I’m not even sure what to say.
I hope that someday I will be funny twice.
OMG pollz plz
I finally figured out how to put polls into my blog (and, I’m assuming, also livejournal without paying for an account). Use pollhost.com:
Okay, I give in
I’m horribly addicted to singing up for free things online. I suspect this is why I have more e-mail accounts than I can reasonably remember to check.
This is also why I have an account with del.icio.us, digg, FlickR, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, and starting now, with Last.fm.
Last.fm is a social music service that Fred Wilson keeps talking about. Because Fred is a VC in the technology area, he’s usually a fairly good judge of which services are cool and useful and which ones aren’t actually that cool.
I figure that since I listen to music more or less whenever I’m doing anything, and I have a very limited scope for discovering new music I might light, I should give last.fm a try. Theoretically, they will help me keep a record of what music I listen to and use correlations between my taste and other people’s tastes to come up with new music recommendations.
I also should get a customized “radio station” of streaming music.
I hope this turns out to be cool. If you’re curious about what i’m listening to, you can find my last.fm profile page here. In a week or so, when there’s enough data, I’ll probably add a list of some sort to the sidebar.
Two links
If you enjoy puzzle games, or anything like the The Mystery of Time and Space that I wrote about in Livejournal ages ago, then there is a new game for you.
My friend sent me the link last night, and jacob and I spent about too many hours getting all the way to level 13 - it bends the mind. There are 138 levels. Go try it.
Link number two I yanked from Boing Boing today. The BBC has happarently compiled a study on gaming habits of people from the ages of 6 to 65, which shows a bunch of things we already basically knew, but with graphs and colorful things, which is always more interesting.
The pdf link for the study is here.
Steve Jobs: Meep
Disney has just agreed to buy Pixar at $7.4 billion. This makes Steve Jobs absolutely insane.
The New York Times article says:
Although there would be no direct equity relationship between Apple and Disney, Mr. Jobs would be the largest individual shareholder in both, and would be likely to hold at least a board seat at Disney.
Which was written and published before the deal went through. Wired reports that the deal went very sweetly indeed for Jobs:
Pixar Chief Executive Steve Jobs will join Disney’s board of directors. Under the agreement, 2.3 Disney shares will be issued for each Pixar share.
In other words, Steve Jobs is now positioned to absolutely control the future of entertainment in the next five years. Think about it. He has working business tied with music production companies (iTunes store), the portable media market strangled (iPod), is a huge shareholder and important voice in a traditional huge media company (Disney), and is at the helm of Apple’s computer production as well, which opens the door for media-center style consumer electronics.
Oh boy.
[ NYT also reports the sale here ]
How many DWA majors does it take?
Oxy sends out a dialy e-mail newsletter (called the “oxy digest”)with campus happenings, news, and other student-submitted bulletins that relate to campus happenings. This blurb was in today’s digest:
“I was a big television junkie as a teen. When I came to Oxy, I completely forgot about television. It wasn’t until the third month when I realized how little TV I had watched and how free I felt from it. No addictions to television programs and making time for them to know ‘what happens next,’ no procrastinating on homework because the NEXT show after looked good too, and no giving up quality friends time for a one-way media box.”
“Cable installation in dorm rooms does not encourage or foster leadership for, ‘an increasingly complex, inter-dependent and pluralistic world.’”
“I have seen the effects of room cable at Pitzer - it has made the students isolated from each other and apathetic to campus life.”
—-
Dear Classmates,
When Oxy was debating installing dorm-room cable TV a few years ago, I encouraged students to write quick notes on what effect they thought cable TV would be have on our community. While I respect the dedication Rameen Talesh and Tom Slobko have demonstrated for improving the breadth of amenities available on campus, I encourage you to think about whether dorm-room cable should be part of your Oxy experience.
Regards,
***************
“Friends don’t let friends watch Cable TV”
—“To me, adding cable TV to every dorm room seems like we’re proposing to turn this once-prestigious college into an expensive roach motel; ‘HBO in every room!’ is what our Mission Statement should say. The Oxy community is already crumbling slowly, and this death blow is not a step anyone needs
to take.”
Now I should fill in some facts:
- Over the break, OXY departments (mainly ITS) installed expensive network hardware to carry cable signals over the existing wired network in Oxy, allowing students to watch some Cable channels on their computers in their rooms.
- Students voted for 25 channels to be included in the $30 monthly basic cable package, and for a few sports channels to be available in a “package” for an additional $10 a month, all charged to the student account.
- This is an optional service. Buy it if you want it, don’t if you don’t.
OK. Now for some guesswork:
- Oxy is unlikely to un-install and throw out the expensive equipment and renege on whatever contract arrangements they have made with the cable providers. Campaigning against OxyTV is literally only an effort to stop people from watching TV.
- People are going to watch TV.
- The “Oxy Community” is, in fact, a place where many different people of different mindsets are actually living, and it is not unreasonable for the school to provide access to living services that are similarly available to people who live off-campus. Such as cable.
Basically, this is exactly the kind of carefully-crafted neutral-but-argumentative pseudo-political and almost entirely specious statement that I hear time and again from almost literally everyone in my major (Diplomacy and World Affairs), and every time I see it I get more and more discouraged from taking any of my classes.
I get the feeling this is not a good way to be approaching my major.
Alpacas
What could I possibly have to say about Alpacas?
Not much, actually. I don’t really know anything about them myself. But my Aunt and Uncle, who own an alpaca farm in Colorado know a fair bit about them.
The layman’s version is that they’re kind of like sheep because you can get a kind of wool from them, and it can be really warm. I think it also used to be a wool reserved for kings and other important people.
If you’re at all interested, check out their blog.
Webcomics
One of my favorite bloggers (well, livejournalers, I guess) has always been theferrett, and just today he announced the first comic of his new joint-operation project. I have no idea if it’s going to be good or not, but Ferrett is hilarious, so I imagine the comic will be worth keeping an eye on.
I’m jealous in any case, given the numerous times I’ve tried to start a webcomic (eventually settling on inserting a monthly piece into Flicker e-zine), but I’m willing to dish out a little love. Check it out if it sounds interesting:
Music note
Go here and play the “Waiting Josh Harris…” (remix) in the playlist. This song is insanely addicting.
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